Eugene’s portrait was uncanny! He didn’t exactly know what uncanny meant but it was probably a good thing. Well, he thought, glancing at his artwork, this was some of his best work, uncanny had to be a good thing. “OK, cool,” he said relieved, “I was worried it might be turning out too neat. And that would just not work.”

He set the page back down on the table and began to dab it with ketchup again, this time trying to capture the shape of his nose. “It’s for baby Billie,” Eugene explained, eyes fixed on the evolving artwork. “I’m an uncle,” he added proudly, “and I’d like to be her favourite uncle.” Eugene paused to glance fiercely at the art critic, “But there's a lot of competition and Leopold already made her a sock puppet.” Eugene’s bottom lip jutted out as he thought about how unfair it was because Eugene would have made a sock puppet if he’d thought about it first. But he wasn’t as magic as Leopold yet and mom didn’t let him near the needles. So all he could’ve done was glue stuff on the sock and glue wasn’t OK for babies.

“So I thought it would help if she had a piece of me to carry around, you know?”

Maybe when he was finished he could do a portrait of the other boy. Eugene often did paintings of other people because they were fun thank you gifts. He’d been working on a macaroni one of the RMI staff but was having some difficulty capturing the personality of Boot in pasta. “Do you want me to draw you a pic--why is that feather tickling that page all by itself? OH, are you drawing a picture of me with your mind?” Eugene smiled widely, displaying each of his dimples, as he settled his full attention on the boy. This guy was so cool. Eugene had to learn how to do that mind trick.

Bryn scanned the piece of parchment that the quill had darted over, the neat writing of the enchanted item significantly neater than his own scrawl. Does it look like me? The picture that was in... more